What is the prime miridia? What is the other name for it and why.
Answers
A prime meridian is a meridian (a line of longitude) in a geographic coordinate system at which longitude is defined to be 0°. Together, a prime meridian and its antimeridian (the 180th meridian in a 360°-system) form a great circle. This great circle divides the sphere, e.g., Earth, into two hemispheres. If one uses directions of East and West from a defined prime meridian, then they can be called the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere.
Gerardus Mercator in his Atlas Cosmographicae (1595) uses a prime meridian somewhere close to 25°W, passing just to the west of Santa Maria Island in the Atlantic. His 180th meridian runs along the Strait of Anián (Bering Strait)
A prime meridian is ultimately arbitrary, unlike an equator, which is determined by the axis of rotation—and various conventions have been used or advocated in different regions and throughout history.[1] The most widely u